Two police officers lead a man presumed to be Josef (centre) into the Amstetten police station. (AFP)

Vienna, April 27 (AP): A woman has told police that she was held prisoner in a cellar for almost 24 years by her father, who repeatedly raped her and fathered at least six children.

Lower Austria police said in a statement that the 42-year-old woman, identified as Elisabeth F., had been missing since August 29, 1984. She was found by the police in the town of Amstetten yesterday evening following a tip.

Franz Polzer, head of the Lower Austrian Bureau of Criminal Affairs, told reporters that the 73-year-old father, identified in a separate police statement as Josef F., had been taken into custody.

In a chronology of events outlined in a statement, the police said Elisabeth had apparently sent a letter a month after her disappearance asking her parents not to search for her.

During questioning, Elisabeth told the police her father began sexually abusing her when she was 11 and sedated, handcuffed and locked her in a room in the cellar on August 28, 1984, in the Lower Austrian town of Amstetten.

During the 24 years that followed, she said she was continually abused by her father and gave birth to six children, the statement said. In 1996, she gave birth to twins but one died days later because it was not appropriately cared for. Josef had then apparently removed the corpse from the cellar and burned it, the statement said.

The police picked up Elisabeth and her father yesterday close to an Amstetten hospital after they received a tip.

According to the police statement, Josef had freed Elisabeth and two of her three children from the cellar, and had told his wife that she had come back to them. The third child in the cellar, Kerstin, was found unconscious on April 19 in the apartment building where the grandparents live, along with a note from Elisabeth asking that she be taken care of. She was then hospitalised.

The police said Elisabeth appeared “greatly disturbed” psychologically during questioning. She agreed to talk only after the authorities assured her that she would no longer have to have contact with her father and that her children would be cared for.

Nineteen-year-old Kerstin is currently hospitalised in Amstetten in very serious condition.

The police said three of the children were registered with authorities and lived with the grandparents.

According to the statement, Josef and his wife, Rosemarie, had told authorities they had found them outside their home in 1993, 1994 and 1997, each time with a note from the mother.

In the first letter, Elisabeth had apparently said she already had a daughter and son. In another letter, she said she gave birth to another son in December 2002, according to the statement.

The other three children were apparently held captive in the cellar with their mother, Polzer told reporters in broadcast remarks. He added, however, that authorities have yet to find the “prison”.

“Elisabeth F. taught them how to speak,” Polzer was quoted as saying by the Austria Press Agency.

APA cited the police as saying Josef has been arrested but had not confessed.

APA quoted Gerhard Sedlacek, spokesperson for the public prosecutor’s office in St. Poelten, as saying that the surviving children — three boys and three girls — are aged between 5 and 20.

DNA tests are expected to determine whether Josef is the father of the children.

Today’s developments are reminiscent of the Natascha Kampusch case, which shocked Austrians less than two years ago.

Kampusch was 10 years old when she was kidnapped in Vienna on her way to school in March 1998. She was held for the next eight and a half years by Wolfgang Priklopil, who largely confined her to a tiny underground dungeon in his home in a quiet Vienna suburb.

Priklopil threw himself in front of a train just hours after Kampusch’s dramatic escape on August 23, 2006.